Welcome to the place where big black pieces of plastic live... that is, vinyl records. Unless you don't know exactly what they're called.

Monday, July 5, 2010

Let's Hear Some Tetris Alternate Music!

"ewwomg its horrible"-x30x208344023x3z0384

FOREWORD: The videos included in this post can cause severe hearing damage. Only watch them if you dare.

Tetris is just an awesome game. It's such a classic that there are MILLIONS of versions of Tetris made around the world. One of them was made by Atari in 1988.

Atari's version had awesome graphics and some nice Russian-style music in 8-bit glory. And the true 8-bit glory is inside the 4-channel POKEY sound chip (notable for its use in the Atari 8-bit family of computers, e.g. Atari 400, Atari 800, Atari XL/XE, etc).

Atari used their own Slapstic protection chips, which were unique to each game, and prevented bootleggers from modifying the ROMs. One of them is on Tetris. But a few clever bootleggers managed to reverse-engineer the protection so that they could modify the copyright and change it to "1989 Video Games" and also change the staff screens...

...while other bootleggers didn't reverse-engineer the Slapstic protection. Guess what they did instead? They decided to replace the POKEY sound chip with a Texas Instruments SN76489 4-channel PSG without modifying the graphics or the sound roms (which were designed for the POKEY and not the SN76489) in any way.

The result? A mess of beeps that are so god-awful that they will set your ears on fire. Just watch the video below to see what I mean.

MitchZer0II ultimately decided to call it "Tetris: the Waixing Edition". If you don't know already, Waixing are a Chinese company that makes pirated games for the Nintendo Entertainment System. They can have some pretty bad music on their games, mostly in the style of Game Boy games made by Yong Yong, but the one that has the worst music out of all the others is Bio Hazard, an attempt at porting Resident Evil to the NES:

The uploader of that video (Tompkins355) claims that the gameplay is quite impressive with the exception of the fact that the game crashes at random times. But one thing he didn't mention is that the music is just plain EAR RAPE...

Well that's all for now. Not only am I a fan of vinyl records, but another one of my interests are video games. Don't worry, I'm still gonna be uploading more vinyl vids on my YouTube account.